I took the subway to the Mall today so I could tour the new National Museum of the American Indian, which just opened this past September. The museum is very nice, but it wasn't at all what I was expecting. They have opted to go the route more of the very basic "educational" facility, rather than a place to warehouse a large quantity of Indian artifacts. The building is dominated by a large round performance space which becomes a central atrium for the building. Today while I was there, they had a drummer, an announcer, and two Plains-style dancers, who would do a small amount of demonstration, but then they would start pulling in members of the audience to participate. The ground floor also has an Indian foods cafe (more on that later), a nice gift shop with very expensive, high quality objets d'arts, and a theater. The second floor has another gift shop with more of the "tourist" souvenir and book type things and a long computer room for individual Indian research. The third floor has another theater and the first of the artifact exhibits, and the fourth floor has more exhibits and the big meeting rooms. A fifth half-floor houses curatorial and administrative offices.
Now, the whole museum is quite good, but I didn't find it to be particularly academic or thorough. Half the third floor and a third of the fourth floor were taken up by exhibits of the works of contemporary Indian artists, and the balance of the third floor was essentially about 21st century Native American experience. The fourth floor exhibits picked one tribe out of the various regions and had some very nice but rather cursory exhibits about those tribes. I also found the meandering cul-de-sac layout of the exhibits to be difficult, and even with the relatively small tourist volume today, it was difficult to get around and navigate the various areas. If such a time exists, it would be nice to tour the place when there are only a handful of people in the building. I was also interested to note how few Indians seemed to be working in the facility,
The highlight of the museum, though, was "Mitsitam," the native foods cafe. It, too, was crowded and awkward due to its architectural design of being one of those multi-station cafeterias so popular these days in institutional settings. A beverage station was centrally located in the space, and there were also a number of dessert items there, including some fine looking fruit tarts. Around the sides were cafeteria stations representing each of several regions: Northern Woodlands, Great Plains, Meso America, Northwest Coast, and South America. Complete menus were available in each area, and I wish I had the time and ability to sample a little bit from each section--I'll have to go back again to eat more. This plan, I think, would work better with sit-down menu service and with several sampler plate options.
I chose to start today with the Northern Woodlands section, where I had a generous serving of maple-roasted turkey breast with a cranberry-crabapple compote and a big dollop of coarsely-ground country-style mustand, and two side dishes, for $9.95. My sides turned out to be quite interesting, I asked the server to choose them for me, and he picked a wild rice salad with pumpkin seeds, pinon nuts, and watercress, and a succotash dish with big chunks of red and yellow tomatoes, lima and brown beans, white corn, onion, and chopped chives, and most interestingly, the succotash was presented cold, as a salad. I also had an Indian pudding for dessert, which, for those of you who've not cooked it before, is nothing more than a baked corn meal mush with dried currants and sweetened with honey--a simple dish, hence I was a little surprised that they charged $3.50 for it (it was tasty, though).
There were so many other things I wanted to try! Some of the more intriguing items included a cedar-planked juniper salmon, a lobster salad (also available as a sandwich), a watermelon and tomato salad, a jicama, orange, and nopales salad, and a big selection of soups. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to another trip back to the museum, if only to eat!
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